Baltimore based Future Islands have announced a run of live dates in the UK and Ireland between May and July this year.
The band, originally from North Carolina, will play six shows in the UK as part of a wider tour of Europe between April and May, before playing a gig at Iveagh Gardens in Dublin. Two or three years ago such a tour would have been unthinkable for the band, but since their performance on Late Night With David Letterman of their acclaimed and successful single ‘Seasons (Waiting On You)’, they have gone from strength to strength. From playing small town American gigs for ’30 bucks a night, gas money to get us to the next place and have something to eat’ (via The Guardian), they now frequently play sold-out venues and festivals whether that be in their homeland or across the Atlantic.
The last time they played on these shores was in 2015 when they played a host of festival sets, including at Glastonbury, End Of The Road and Bestival. Speaking to the Guardian about his live persona, frontman Sam Herring, revealed he tries, ‘to open up the audience by opening up yourself … The feeling we’re trying to create in our shows is to kind of poke at people. It’s just like, Move! Get going! Do something! Feel something, take my hand, hold on to that person beside you, feel this energy, you know. That’s the hope. It’s all a hope.’ If that sounds like your kind of thing, tickets for the UK dates wll be available from 10am on Wednesday (25th January) whereas Irish fans will have to wait until 9am on Friday (27th January) to get their hands on them.
Although their last album was 2014’s singles and there are no official plans for anything this year, members of the band have still been busy with side-projects or contributing on a more ad hoc basis to creating music in a variety of places. Samuel T. Herring appeared on Toronto based jazz collective BadBadNotGood’s 2016 single, ‘Time Moves Slow.’ Meanwhile, another member of Future Islands, William Cashion, released an album, ‘Honey’, last September with Double Dagger’s Bruce Willen, as members of Peals. Herring has even moved beyond the strict confines of making music, and appeared in Clams Casino’s video ‘Ghost in a Kiss’ which follows the Future Island’s frontman through a day in his life (well, not his life exactly, but the life of a normal person…)
The full UK and Ireland Tour schedule is shown below:
27/4 – Barrowlands – Glasgow
28/4 – University Stylus – Leeds
29/4 – O2 Academy – Liverpool
30/4 – Brighton Dome – Brighton
2/5 – Rock City – Nottingham
3/5 – O2 Academy – Bristol
6/7 – Iveagh Gardens – Dublin
